Food is love

Food.  I love food.  And I express love through food.  I make food for the people I love and send food to the people in my life that I value.  Food is love. 

This is a closeup of Mom's birthday cake, a plum flan: 

It looks a little like the Utah landscape near Kanab, hills and valleys, cliffs and rivers... a thing of beauty and yes it was delicious!

I've been thinking a lot about food in the past months as a friend has just had rather extreme surgery by choice and was, post-surgery, very limited in the kinds and quality of foods she could eat.  This led me to realize how social food is:  we get together to eat in a restaurant, we make special foods for special occasions, every Holiday has its own iconic foods, we show people how much we care for them by making their favorite meals, we gift food to people we want to make feel special, we say "thank you" with a gift of food...  So how much does your relationship change with a person who has a very restricted diet or basically can not eat with you or anything you could possibly offer?  What do you do instead?

I love food.  I love experimenting with food, trying different flavours and I love gifting food.  So I had a really hard time, antisocial as I am, to re-define my understanding of its role in my friendships.  If there is no food, no shared food pleasure, no food distraction, what is there?  Luckily, the friend is a gem and worth any little discomfort or awkwardness that might arise and we'll work it out.        


While some pieces of love are delicate and difficult (like these squiggles), others require a group effort (like a gazillion yeast organisms helping you out)

and still others (like these thumbprint chocolate cookies with Caramilk centers) are flat-out ease and comfort!



So, enjoy!  Savour!  And realize how lucky we are to be able to appreciate food as more than just a necessity.